On behalf of National Institute for Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi, and the Department of Economic Affairs of the Ministry of Finance, New Delhi, the organisers invite papers for the 13th Research Meeting of the NIPFP-DEA Research Program. This builds on the preceding 12 such meetings (http://macrofinance.nipfp.org.in/meetings.html). The meetings have a blend of academic scholars, senior policy makers and finance practitioners.

THEME:

Macroeconomics and Finance, with an accent on capital controls, capital flows, international finance including firm internationalisation, the exchange rate regime and monetary policy. Papers that illuminate these issues in emerging markets are of particular interest.

The Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP has openings in analytical economics and public policy work.

Economists

We require individuals with a Ph.D. in economics or finance, with an interest in original research in our fields. These would be contractual appointments for a period of two years. One or more publications in international journals would be helpful, as would be the ability to carry research from inception all the way to publication.

Policy research associates

We require people who can participate in large complex projects in the field of public policy, ranging from envisioning the future to implementing it.

Policy work is highly inter-disciplinary, spanning the fields of public economics, finance, economics, law, and public administration. Deep finance practitioner knowledge is important. Equally important is looking beyond the present and envisioning the future, with first principles reasoning that is informed by international experience. We welcome interest in these positions by people with strong capabilities in some of these areas, and curiosity about the others. The ideal candidates would have read the Percy Mistry, Raghuram Rajan and FSLRC reports, and have familiarity with the things being talked about in this blog.

Quantitative research associates

We require individuals with a Masters degree in economics, finance, public policy or statistics. The work involves participating in academic research projects in the fields of macroeconomics and finance, and practical macroeconomic policy analysis. Desirable features include: domain knowledge; knowledge of computer programming, ideally in R; experience with CMIE databases and datastream. Some of the people who have done this for a couple of years have gone on to do Ph.D. in economics or finance at top schools.

Research programmers

We require a senior person who would play a dual role. On one hand, he would be responsible for an existing system which includes linux desktops, linux servers, and a project management system based on redmine and svn. This is expected to take up roughly 20% of effort. The prime focus will be participating in development work of complex analysis of economic and financial data. This development work is primarily in R. It includes building internal tools and also packages released as open source, such as our R packages fxregime, eventstudies.

Such work could be particularly appropriate for a person who is at present a computer engineer but desires knowledge of economics and finance.

Generic features

The Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP is a conducive research environment including a modern office. Compensation is generally superior to that seen in government academic institutions. The policy and the quantitative teams are strongly interconnected with significant spillovers of knowledge. We are a research environment: non-hierarchical, low politics, high IQ, high intensity and high involvement.